Tag: Undergraduate

Forty-two judges joined WashU Olin’s entrepreneurship team in celebrating student innovation on April 18 as eight finalists made startup pitches resulting in a first-place tie for the Olin Cup—a first in recent memory.

Meanwhile, more than 90 other teams competed for a piece of a $15,000 prize pool in Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce competition with pitches based on business ideas generated in the Hatchery program. The Olin entrepreneurship program attracted 55 judges to participate in that competition.

In the Olin Cup competition, eight finalists pitched and two emerged on top: PaperTrail (a car enthusiast record platform) and Find It (a platform to restore lost items to their owners using decorative QR code stickers).

Camille Devaney, BSBA 2025; Ethan Weilheimer, BS/EN 2025; Justin Moreno, BSBA 2023; and Maggie Croghan, BSBA 2023, were the team behind Find It. Meanwhile, the other Olin Cup-winning team included Kuo Wang, BS/EN/Master of engineering; Christian Robinson, BSBA 2026; Drew Kassman, business minor 2025; Andrew Padousis, BSBA 2025; and Jimmy Lancaster, BSBA/EN 2025, the team behind PaperTrail.

The two teams shared custody of the large Olin Cup trophy.

Winners were also named for undergraduate and graduate school teams in Olin’s BIG IdeaBounce competition. These teams competed for a share of the $15,000 prize pool.

The undergraduate team winner was ACHORD, a platform matching students to music
teachers based on connection factors. The grad team winner was Say, Hi!, an online platform
that connects people experiencing mental distress to licensed social workers, psychologists and
counselors around the world. Both teams won $3,000.

Second-prize entries won $1,250, third-prize entries received $750 and 10 runners-up got $500.

Pictured at top: The Olin Cup winning teams—Find It, left, and PaperTrail, right—wrestle over the prize after tying in the competition on April 18.

Drake Shafer, BSBA 2023, grew up in Glasford, population 834, near Peoria, Illinois, and attended high school with 50 graduating seniors. With his mom’s encouragement, he became the first in his family to go to college and the first student from his high school in generations to attend a top-20 university.

“Something felt different when I toured WashU,” said Shafer, who visited more than a dozen campuses. “Instead of trying to see myself fitting into the campus and student life, I immediately felt at home.”

Shafer enrolled at Olin School of Business, but he felt behind as soon as he started. Some classmates had business experience, and some had parents with successful business careers. Fortunately, he said, “many of the professors in the Olin Business School that I’ve had aim to help every student succeed academically and professionally, no matter their background.”

Scholarship support made it possible for Shafer to attend the university. It “has given me the opportunity to solely focus on my education and the experience of being a learner, something I’ll never find the words to completely express my gratitude for,” he said. “More privileged and higher-income students can’t begin to think about the implications and struggles that come along with being from a lower-income background.”

Last fall, the university launched Make Way: Our Student Initiative, a fundraising effort to increase financial resources for undergraduate scholarships, graduates scholarships and fellowships, and a best-in-class student experience. Through Make Way, WashU aims to increase access and opportunity for students at every level of need.

A chance to delve into the student experience

In his second year, Shafer was chosen to participate in the inaugural class of the Chancellor’s Career Fellowship program. The program provides career-oriented opportunities for first-year or sophomore students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds. The skills Shafer gained helped him land his first internship, and the university provided a stipend to help offset housing costs during the experience.

Now in his senior year at Olin, Shafer has delved deeply into the student experience. He’s majoring in marketing, operations and supply chain management, and he’s minoring in the business of entertainment. He participated in the student-owned consulting firm Bear Studios. He opened Gallery 314, a retail store on campus. And he completed a global management internship at Anheuser-Busch.

“Thanks to my Olin experience, I now feel just as capable as my classmates to take on a high-caliber career.”

After graduation, Shafer will head to Chicago to join the Kraft Heinz Company’s trainee program.

He said he hopes his collegiate success will lead to a fulfilling career and enable him to give back to those who supported his journey—especially the WashU community and his family.

“WashU has helped me learn how to take on—and succeed in—multiple roles. I’ll keep these experiences with me for the rest of my life.”

Anna Riek, BSBA 2023, interviewed Pellegrino Riccardi, a master storyteller, communicator and coach, after she watched his TED Talk as part of a class. She shared the video and wrote this for the Olin Blog.

In my interview, “Authenticity in Business,” communication expert Pellegrino Riccardi and I touched on everything from workplace culture to well-being, ending with Riccardi’s advice for graduating college students.

Bringing your whole self to work every day is a long-term investment in your career and your well-being. If you’re not authentic, your mental health suffers, you feel isolated and lonely, and you quickly face burnout. When we remember that inauthenticity is basically lying, it’s no wonder that it’s unsustainable. Authenticity requires integrity, curiosity and bravery.

The topic of authenticity often comes up in business discussions. Authentic leadership has become almost a buzzword, and consumers increasingly look for companies and products with an authentic feel. I’ve thought a lot about authenticity during my four years at WashU—attending events, reading books, writing articles and even giving guest lectures.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to communication, the fundamental interaction between two humans and an opportunity for empathy, respect and understanding. Who better to discuss all of this with than internationally acclaimed speaker, author and communication expert, Pellegrino Riccardi?

Based in Norway, Riccardi built his career around helping people communicate more authentically, whether that’s between cultures, in a boardroom or in the classroom. After being introduced to his well-known TEDTalk on cross-cultural communication in a leadership class, I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm and cold emailed him.

To my delight, he responded and we discussed the topics of authenticity and communication. I gained so much from his insight that I wanted to meet again so we could share our conversations. This interview is for you.

As Riccardi would say, make sure your stage self matches your sofa self. Remember, your true self is what you’re good at. Lean into your strengths. Be open to new opportunities. Embrace imperfection. And culture is contagious, so look for organizations in which authenticity is founded on communication and fostered through psychological safety.

Postscript

Ekin Pellegrini, an Olin adjunct professor who teaches the organizational behavior class Anna took, wrote to the Olin Blog to say she “went to the extra mile” in a class assignment: “I had assigned a TED Talk that all students were required to study prior to class. Anna not only studied it but also reached out the speaker. She convinced him to do an interview! I hope you will find her enthusiasm for learning and her relentless pursuit of taking initiative worth highlighting.”

WashU Olin’s BSBA program ranked ninth in the latest ranking of undergraduate business schools from Poets & Quants, a showing that reflects the increasing competitiveness of the ranking since it debuted with WashU at No. 1 in 2016.

In the 2023 edition of the Poets & Quants ranking, Olin fell five spots from its 2022 ranking, which was released March 1. That showing came in spite of the school garnering an overall score of 95.52—nearly three points higher than last year’s score.

P&Q centers its ranking on three main criteria: the quality of the incoming students, the career outcomes students achieve after graduation and their view of their school’s academic experience. The former two criteria are based on surveys of school data (e.g., acceptance rates, SAT scores, salary averages) completed between June and December. The latter student experience data is based on a survey of graduates from the class of 2020.

Olin remained stable at fourth place in employment results, and rose from 29th to 17th in academic experience, but fell to eighth in the admissions category.

A group of WashU Olin undergraduates cooked up a sweet selection of recommendations for a St. Louis-area bakery that provides a second chance for individuals who have been released from prison.

In their Small Business Initiative consulting project—through Olin’s Center for Experiential Learning—the students consulted with Laughing Bear Bakery, a mostly wholesale business located in St. Louis’ Tower Grove South neighborhood. The students—Grace Shen, BSBA 2025; Gavri Steiger, AB 2025; Jake Wolf, BSBA 2025; AJ Sann, BSBA 2024; and Oliver Every, BSBA 2025—were charged with working with the bakery’s founders to suggest ways to make the nonprofit more sustainable.

“From our first meeting, it was apparent that at the heart of the business was a social cause” Steiger said during a recent in-person presentation to the founders at Olin. “We thought there were things on the business end that could match the passion of their social commitment.”

The students visited Laughing Bear—which was featured in an NBC-TV Today Show video in November 2022—to meet with founder and former prison chaplain Kalen McAllister, along with other employees and board members. The students dug deep into the bakery’s pricing model, its sales and expenses, its product lineup and its marketing. A good deal of the work was aimed at putting order to a business model—critical to the nonprofit’s ability to apply for grant funding.

“It was super fun to work with an actual business. I really love talking to the founders of businesses. I was lucky and happy to do it,” Shen said. “People our age often don’t get the chance to contribute in such a meaningful way.” Through their analysis, the students developed “price sensitivity models” to adjust the bakery’s work to seasonal needs and a five-year growth plan.

They also proposed a “donation cookie”—a product customers could buy, and enjoy, while effectively donating to Laughing Bear’s cause.

“A lot of people miss the fact that not all business are the same,” said Mike Whipkey, a member of Laughing Bear’s board of directors, who watched the students’ presentation. “A lot of the time, people get good advice, but it’s delivered really badly, and these guys understood that.”

Members of the student team stressed how thrilled they were to make a real-world contribution to a cause-oriented business they could get behind.

“Being able to give insights to people who may not have a business background, but can benefit from something I learned in class — that was really exciting for us,” Sann said.

Pictured above, from left: Mike Whipkey, Jake Wolf, AJ Sann, Oliver Every, Gavri Steiger and Grace Shen.

Diane Toroian Keaggy originally wrote this article for The Source.

Vivienne Chang and Eugenia Yoh met back in 2019 at a campus hotpot party hosted by the Taiwanese Students Organization. The two students soon learned, not surprisingly, they both loved the food, culture and people of Taiwan where they both had family. They also discovered another, more unusual passion—children’s books. 

Chang, an economics and strategy student at Olin Business School, will make a beeline to the picture book section of any bookstore she visits. And Yoh, a communication design graduate of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, grew up dreaming that one day she would illustrate children’s books. So when Yoh decided to take a gap year during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chang had an idea. 

“I was like, ‘Let’s make a children’s book,’” Chang recalled. “I had no idea how the publishing industry worked, but I thought it would be a fun project for us to do together.” 

Soon the friends met at a Panera to sketch out their tale of an American girl who moves to Taiwan. A month later, they had an agent. A month after that, they found themselves at the center of a four-way bidding war among the nation’s leading publishing houses. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers won and signed Yoh and Chang to a two-book deal. All in all, the journey from concept to contract took a mere four months — definitely not how the publishing industry typically works.

“My relatives in Taiwan actually thought we got scammed because it all seemed too good to be true,” Chang said. “We were definitely very, very fortunate.” 

The result is “This is Not My Home,” a funny but aching story about Lily, who must leave her friends and school in America to help her mother care for her grandmother in Taiwan. Lily does not like her new home—the strange food, the crowded market, the weird toilets—but, in time and with a mother’s love, she finds her place.

“From the start, I wanted to make a book about a girl who is feeling raw and genuine anger,” Yoh said. “We tell the story against the cultural backdrop of Taiwan, a place that is very important to both of us. But any child who has had to move can see themselves in Lily.”

Throughout the creative process, Yoh and Chang received helpful feedback from John Hendrix, a professor and chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Illustration & Visual Culture program, and support from their friends in the Asian community. In addition to serving as executives of the Taiwanese Students Organization, Yoh and Chang also performed at Lunar New Year with the Chinese Yo-yo Club.

In coming weeks, Chang and Yoh will launch a small book tour starting in St. Louis. Readings are scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4, at Betty’s Books, 10 Summit Ave., and at 6 p.m. Feb. 7 at Subterranean Book, 6271 Delmar Blvd.

After that, they will start planning their next book while pursuing very different careers. Yoh’s dream of illustrating children’s books did come true. After graduating in 2022, she moved to San Francisco, where she designs children’s book covers for Chronicle Books. And Chang, who is scheduled to graduate in May, has accepted a job in New York as an innovation analyst for JP Morgan.

“We don’t know what the next book will be, but we’re excited to do it together,” Chang said.